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Next month, my daughter Ella will turn 11 years old. She's a beautiful girl, with blond hair and green eyes. She's an amazing artist, a brilliant writer, and she can do the splits without even warming up.

And if I hadn't had an amniocentesis, she would have died the day she was born.

Just over 11 years ago, I received a call from my obstetrician's assistant to let me know that there was an anomaly in my recent blood test. "It's probably just a testing error," she assured me.

But when I returned the following week to have the blood test redone, the anomaly showed up again. There was a foreign antibody in my blood stream that shouldn't have been there. I was six months pregnant, and up to that point my pregnancy had been completely normal.

Rather than turning to my local politician for prenatal advice, I followed the guidance of my obstetrician, who sent me to a perinatologist, who recommended I have an amniocentesis. Because he had a medical degree and years of experience treating pregnant women, I followed his recommendation.

That day, he stuck an alarmingly long needle directly into my growing belly to sample the amniotic fluid around my baby. The results weren't good. She had Rh negative disease...

Amniocentesis is the recommended test to diagnose this disease, and it enables doctors to define a course of action to treat and monitor these babies for the best possible medical outcome. Had I not had that amniocentesis I likely would not have discovered that she had this illness. I would have carried her to term, given birth to her, and watched her die in my arms...

If Rick Santorum had his way, I wouldn't have been able to get that test, and she most likely would have died. Because according to him, tests that give parents vital information about the health of their unborn children are morally wrong. Though he has no medical training, and no business commenting on the medical decisions that women and their doctors make, he argues that such tests shouldn't be provided, or that employers at least should be allowed to opt out of paying for them on "moral grounds."

Eleven years ago, my husband and I had two kids and a mortgage, and like most young families we didn't have $2,000 to pay for a test that my husband's employer might object to on moral grounds.

So, while Mr. Santorum may think that his blowhard opinions about when and where women should be allowed to have medical tests is righteous, I say it's ignorance.

In the Catholic church where I was raised, pride, arrogance and an overinflated sense of oneself were considered sins. But in Rick Santorum's world they are virtues, and they make up the foundation from which he proclaims how other people should live their lives...

As a nation, we are at the precipice of a slippery slope where men in power are arguing about how to take basic rights away from women. I shudder to think what lays at the bottom of that slope, but if Rick Santorum has his way we will all soon find out.